A Summer of Kings (19 page)

I called down to him with tears rolling down my face, "And didn't you hear what I said? I'm on strike." Then I climbed higher into the tree and waited to see if my father really would climb up after me.

My father didn't move. He used his I'm-too-angry-to-even-shout voice and said, "Esther, I don't know when in my life I've been more furious and disappointed in you," and I thought,
How about five minutes ago?
He was always disappointed in me, but I didn't say anything out loud.

My father stood beneath the tree, staring up into the branches, and I stayed standing, peeking out from the leaves now and again to see if he was still there.

Finally, he gave up and left, and I suppose I should have felt victorious, but all I felt was sad. I felt so sad, I could hardly stand it. I climbed back down to my good branch and I lay face down on it and hugged the branch with my arms and legs. I hugged the branch and cried. I cried because I knew I had acted awful and childish and stupid, and I cried because I couldn't help how I had acted and because I knew my family hated me. Everybody hated me, and so I cried and let the tears drop onto the grass below. I cried until I had no more tears left and was too exhausted to hurt anymore. Then I let go of the branch with my arms and legs and let them dangle there
as though I were a leopard in a tree, and I felt heavy and limp and wet.

I don't know how long I stayed like that in the tree—maybe hours, maybe minutes—but then I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel again and I lifted my head to see who was coming.

It was King-Roy.

I sat up and got myself arranged in the flat of the branch, brushed my bangs out of my face, tucked my hair behind my ears, and wiped at my eyes.

King-Roy walked through the grass as though he were afraid of stepping on flowers or ants or some other delicate thing. He took his time getting to the tree, and when he got there, he didn't look up and try to find me. Instead he turned around and leaned his back against the trunk and stood there with his arms folded. I looked down at the top of his dark head and waited for him to speak. I waited and waited. Finally, when I had given up and had decided that he didn't even know I was there but had just come to spend the time of day standing beneath the tree, he spoke.

He said, "They sent me out here to talk to you."

I swung my legs. "Who sent you out?"

"Your parents. They want me to get you to come on down out of that tree."

"I'm mad at them. I'm mad at everybody. That's why I'm up here."

King-Roy used his back to push off the tree an inch or two, then he fell back against it and nodded.

"Stewart said I got you in big trouble. He said this is all my fault."

I lifted my right leg up to the branch and grabbed it around the knee, letting the other leg dangle on its own. "I don't want to talk about it," I said. "I don't even want to think about yesterday."

"Then what do you want to talk about?" King-Roy asked.

I thought a second, then said, "Tree houses. I wish I had me a tree house. You ever had a tree house, King-Roy?"

"No. What you want a tree house for, anyway; tree houses are for little boys."

I shrugged and set my chin on my knee. "So why did you come back here, anyways?"

King-Roy pushed off the tree again, only this time he didn't fall back against it. He turned around and looked at me.

I sprang up, grabbing the branch above me, and stood looking down on him. I was nervous all of a sudden seeing his face again. His eyes looked sad behind his glasses. His eyelids looked heavy, as though they were too heavy for him to hold open all the way. He looked away and leaned sideways against the tree and said, "Your mother called my momma and told her where I was, and then I called home last night just to say hey, and Momma got on me and told me to get on back out to y'alls' house and stay put till the end of the summer."

"How come she wants you here so badly?" I asked.

"She wants me safe. She doesn't want me to get myself into any more trouble," King-Roy said.

"So ... so, you're not here 'cause you want to be."

"No," King-Roy said, shaking his head.

I sighed and wished I had a pebble or something to throw at his head. "So you still like Yvonne, then, I guess."

King-Roy looked up into the tree at me. "Course I like Yvonne; why shouldn't I?"

I shrugged and pulled apart a leaf I had picked. "I guess you like girls hanging all over you like that. You like flirty girls." I tore at the leaf some more.

King-Roy dropped his head and said, "I don't want to talk about that with you."

"Why not?" I asked, letting the shredded leaf fall down on his head.

He brushed the leaf bits off and said, "I just told you I'm not talking to you about that."

I pulled at another leaf. "Okay, King-Roy, okay, but it's just—it's just that I thought you liked me."

King-Roy pushed off the tree and looked up at me. "I do like you, Esther, but you tell me, what you think is ever gon' come of that, huh?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Well I'll tell you. Nothin'."

I reached my arms over the branch in front of my chest and leaned forward to look down on King-Roy. "Because you're black and I'm white and you don't like white people?"

King-Roy dropped his gaze and didn't answer me.

I crouched and climbed down to the next limb, a limb closer to King-Roy. "You know what I wish?" I asked him. "I wish there was no such thing as black and white. Why were we made different colors, anyway? What's the point of that?" I climbed down to the next branch and sat.

King-Roy said, "I don't know, but I'll tell you what I wish. I wish I had my own life. I wish I could be a man, a real man who wasn't afraid of anything."

"What are you afraid of, King-Roy?" I slid myself down to the lowest branch and swung my legs above King-Roy's head. I knew if he reached a hand up he could touch me.

King-Roy shook his head. "You don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

"You don't know what it's like for a black man. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid I'm gon' sit in the wrong place or drink from the wrong cup or look at the wrong person or touch the wrong thing. Alls I got to do is look wrong at something and I'll find myself with a noose around my neck."

I nodded. "I guess everybody's scared of something."

King-Roy made a face up at me like he didn't believe what I had just said. "Now, what you got to be afraid of?" he asked me.

I pointed my toes and tried to touch his face with my feet. I thought about his question for a minute, and then I said, "I guess, King-Roy, I guess I'm scared I'm always going to like tree houses."

When King-Roy asked me if I planned to stay up in the tree all day, I told him that I would come down only if he promised not to laugh at me.

"Now, why would I laugh at you?" King-Roy asked.

"Just promise me you won't laugh," I said. "Don't even look at me, okay?"

"I'm looking at you right now and I see nothing funny."

"That's because I'm sitting down."

"Esther, are you coming out of that tree or not?"

"All right," I said. I straddled the branch, locked my knees and swung myself around it, then dropped to the grass.

King-Roy crouched down to help me stand, holding me by the waist. We stood back up together. I looked into his eyes and I saw a light in them, the light of laughter just about to break out, and I shouted, "King-Roy, you promised!"

King-Roy let go of me, stood back for a better look, then burst out with a donkey laugh, and I couldn't help myself; I laughed, too.

He slapped his thigh and pointed at me and said, "Esther, girl, what you got on?"

I laughed and said, "You like it? I wore it just for you." I put one hand on my hip and one on the back of my head and sashayed around. "I bet Yvonne never looked so good."

King-Roy laughed up some more donkey brays and said, "Sure 'nuff, you're an original, Esther. You're one hundred percent original."

I stopped sashaying and looked at King-Roy, and I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Being an original sounded like a good thing, but living an original life, I had begun to realize, was a lonely, left-behind kind of life.

King-Roy saw that I had stopped laughing, and he stopped, too, saying, "Whew," and wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes.

I wanted to change the subject and think about something happy, so I asked him, "King-Roy, are you really ever going to teach me how to tap?"

We started walking across the lawn toward the house and King-Roy nodded and said, "All right. We'll start tonight, how 'bout that?"

I smiled. "That sounds perfect."

When we got inside the house, Mother was waiting for me and she said, "King-Roy, if you don't mind, I'd like to speak to Esther alone for a minute."

King-Roy nodded and headed upstairs and I followed my mother into the living room, where she had Andy Williams playing on the record player. He was singing
"Moon River" and we had come in just as he was singing the line, "Two drifters off to see the world..." I wanted more than anything to join those drifters if it meant avoiding another confrontation with Mother, but I sat down next to her on the sofa and waited for what she was about to say.

Mother had on her cream-colored dress with the short little jacket, and I thought how smart and pretty she always looked. I marveled at how she never looked hot, no matter how warm it got outside. I brushed my own damp bangs out of my eyes and stared down at her pretty pink-painted fingernails and listened while Mother told me how important it was that she be by Madeline's side that next week.

"She's going back into the hospital on Monday, Esther, and I need to be there to help her, so I see this strike nonsense of yours as a very selfish and defiant act at Madeline's expense. She has no one else, no husband or children to care for her."

I looked down at my own grubby nails, dirty with tree bark, and said, "All I want is a little thanks now and again, a little show of appreciation. All I want is for everybody to stop picking on me."

I looked up at Mother. Her eyes flashed at me angrily, and she asked, "Did you thank me for today's lunch?"

"No," I said.

"Did you thank me for ironing your shirts last week?"

"No."

"Do you ever thank me when you're home sick and I take care of you?"

"Well, I hope I do, but I guess I don't or you wouldn't be asking me," I said.

"The answer," my mother said, "is no, you do not. No one thanks me for driving them to the train station or picking up laundry or buying the groceries or cooking dinner or any of the other million and one things I do around this large household. Even with Daisy coming two times a week to help out, that still leaves me with too much to do, and do I ever get thanked?" Mother asked. She pinched her lips together and stared at me.

I touched her pretty hand. "Mother, thanks for all of those things."

Mother withdrew her hands. "I wasn't asking for thanks, Esther," she said with irritation. "I was just demonstrating to you that being a mother and a housewife is a thankless job, so you might as well get used to it because it doesn't get any better."

I set my hand back in my lap and said, "So you mean you don't ever thank me because no one thanks you? Like a payback? Is it like that, Mother, a payback?"

Mother stood up and shook with frustration. "Esther, no, it is not a payback. Honestly, how you could misunderstand what I'm saying, I don't know. I'm saying," Mother let out her breath, "I'm saying, that someday you, too, will be a wife and mother and no one is going to thank you for all the little things you do for
them so there is no use going on strike over the fact that someone didn't thank you. What if I went on strike? How would that be? Would you tell me that? This whole household would come to a standstill."

While Mother was speaking she had begun to pace with her arms folded in front of her, and her pretty cream pumps left small heel dents in the oriental carpet.

I watched her walk back and forth, and when she came to a stop in front of me, after announcing how the whole house would come to a standstill, I said, "Mother, from now on I'm going to make sure I thank you for everything. Thank you even for this talk. Thank you for lunch and for bringing me soup when I'm sick and for taking me to school when I've missed the bus and for doing my laundry, and from now on, I'm just going to remember to thank you."

Mother stood there blinking at me, and I couldn't tell if she was irritated with me still or what, but she couldn't seem to get anything to come out of her mouth except some sputtering sounds, so I added, "And I'll take Sophia to her rehearsals this week if you'll thank me, too, when we get back home."

I could see by the red blotches moving up Mother's neck that this was the wrong thing to say, so I jumped up from my seat and said over Andy Williams's rendition of "Three Coins in a Fountain," "You don't
have
to thank me. I just thought you could, or you might, or ... or, something. So ... so, thanks for the talk, Mother, and I'll go now."

The record had ended and was starting over again when I scurried out of the room. I had reached the first landing on the stairs when I heard Andy Williams sing out, "Love is a many splendored thing," and I remembered Pip and how he had said that love was not something that you planned like a road trip, but an affair of the heart, and I thought it must be so, because how else could I explain my love for my mother.

That next week, I took Sophia to her rehearsals, got her settled backstage, and then I took Stewart to his ballet lessons. I hadn't spoken to my parents about Stewart and ballet because my father was out of town all that week, and it never seemed to be the right time to talk about it with Mother. She had enough to worry about with her sick friend, Madeline. She came home in the late afternoons looking so tired and hot—for once in her life she looked hot—it worried me. I did my best to help her out by getting some kind of canned or TV dinner on the table on the days when Daisy didn't come, and I cleaned up afterward, with Auntie Pie's help, and I kept quiet about the lessons. I figured my parents would realize Stewart was taking the ballet lessons when they got the bill for them, but Stewart said Mother and Dad had never said anything to him about any other bill, and he had been sneaking off for lessons whenever he could.